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This focal chapter deals with the understanding of important ethical theories used in executive moral reasoning such as teleology, deontology, distributive justice and corrective justice, virtue ethics versus ethics of trust, from the perspectives of intrinsic versus instrumental good, moral worth versus moral obligation, and moral conscience versus moral justification. Ethical and moral reasoning will power executives to identify, explore, and resolve corporate moral dilemma, especially in the wake of emerging gray market areas where good and evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, and truth and falsehood cannot be easily distinguished. We focus on developing corporate skills of awareness of ethical values and moral imperatives in current otherwise highly commoditized and turbulent human, market, and corporate situations. The challenges of morality are multifaceted and diverse. Professionals usually have self-discipline and self-regulation abilities, ego strength, and social skills. Morality in the professions is not concerned with the issues of rudimentary socialization; rather, the issues involve deciding between conflicting values, where each value represents something good in itself. There are problems in both knowing what is right, good, true, and just on the one hand, and on the other hand, in doing what is right and avoiding wrong, doing good and avoiding evil, and being fair and just while avoiding being unfair and unjust. Several contemporary cases will illustrate the challenging dimensions of ethical and moral reasoning, moral judgment and moral justification embedded in executive decision processes, and corporate growth and profitability ventures.

With the large majority of colleges and schools of business integrating ethics into their curricula, business ethics educators must work to improve the quality of instruction and find methods that enhance student learning. Because many films now address business ethics issues, the content of these films may be used to enhance the teaching of business ethics to undergraduate and graduate business students. This chapter suggests films that may be presented in business ethics classes to illustrate the four ethical categories set forth by the accrediting body for schools of business, The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International), in their 2004 report on ethics education in business schools: ethical decision-making, ethical leadership, responsibility of business in society, and corporate governance.

Currently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and several outer space industry multibillionaire entrepreneurs – e.g., Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), to name a few – are actively engaged in outer space research that reports innovative advances, such as outer space mining, outer space tourism, outer space medicine labs, outer space terraforming of Mars and moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extraterrestrial survivability. All these advances induce serious ethical concerns of human identity and dignity and destiny, human rights and privileges over earth and her resources, and cosmic sustainability. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth and cosmos are meant solely for man's use) and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic, and pro-human project. Critical thinking invites sustainability development to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and transhuman developments. While outer space research certainly offers great hopes of newer living spaces and resources for mankind already strapped by depleted terrestrial habitable spaces, we believe that this capital-intensive “elitist” unregulated outer space research industry may benefit a chosen few at the expense of polarizing mankind in terms of one's undeserved financial capacities to afford extraterrestrial spaces and privileges while endangering Nature by deploying massive terrestrial energy resources for outer space rocket launches causing trailing cosmic debris and planetary pollution. We frame this complex problem into terrestrial humanist issues versus extraterrestrial transhumanist issues, each domain triggered by pro-planetary versus pro-cosmic breakthrough technologies, thus creating a fourfold framework that enables us to explore a distributed ethical strategic understanding and ethical resolution of outer space ethical concerns.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept and the content of courses on ‘social ethics’. It will present a dilemma that arises in the design of such courses. On the one hand, they may present versions of ‘applied ethics’; that is, courses in which moral theories are applied to moral and social problems. On the other hand, they may present generalised forms of ‘occupational ethics’, usually professional ethics, with some business ethics added to expand the range of the course. Is there, then, not some middle ground that is distinctively designated by the term ‘social ethics’? The article will argue that there is such a ground. It will describe that ground as the ethics of ‘social practices’. It will then illustrate how this approach to the teaching of ethics may be carried out in five domains of social practice: professional ethics, commercial ethics, corporate ethics, governmental ethics, and ethics in the voluntary sector. The aim is to show that ‘social ethics’ courses can have a clear rationale and systematic content.

This paper explores how major work in contemporary practical and applied ethics can be incorporated into the teaching of ethics (including professional, business, and applied ethics) to enhance its practicality and relevance. It explores three areas. First, while ethics education often focusses on applying principles to fact situations, how and why practitioners in the real world will act morally also depends a quite different factor: legitimacy. Legitimacy refers to an entity’s moral status, and whether it warrants respect and support because of the presence of key qualities like efficacy, consent, deliberation, and democracy. Second, understanding ethical decision-making models can be valuable to future practitioners as it makes them aware of potential weak links in their attempts to act morally, and empowers them to think strategically about how these weaknesses may be combatted. Third, the use of philosophical theory in teaching practical ethics is a vexed question, involving issues of complexity, reductive-ness and indoctrination. However, explicitly confronting the range of epistemic states (beliefs and attitudes) that students can adopt helps show how these issues may be sensibly mitigated.

The chapter focuses on how engaging undergraduate and graduate students at a metropolitan university through community-based experiential learning can help them make a difference in their personal relationships, in their workplaces and in their communities.

The chapter explores the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Department of Speech Communication’s integrated approach to undergraduate and graduate curriculum that focuses on four types of casing complex problems and making positive, ethical recommendations to make a difference. Specifically, the chapter explores how problem-based learning; service-learning; narrative ethnography; and research projects can be used as meaningful ways to case complex communication issues and to make ethical, theory-informed recommendations to not only do no harm but also affect positive change and promote social justice in students’ personal relationships, organizations, and communities.

Lessons learned from the programmatic approach are shared that include building a theoretical base for students to draw from, integrating case approaches into the curriculum, and engaging resistance and failure. Chapter recommendations promote using theory as a lever for learning, building meaningful relationships with stakeholders, and adopting a process orientation that embraces failure.

The chapter offers a review of four undergraduate courses and four graduate courses, with explicit applications of the four case approaches. Additionally, learning objectives, major assignment descriptions, and assessment approaches are detailed for each course.

Research has demonstrated that ethical leadership helps to limit subordinates' workplace deviance. In this chapter, we draw on social cognitive theory of moral thought and action to further understand why ethical leadership has a preventing impact on workplace deviance. We propose that the key mechanism between ethical leadership and deviance is moral disengagement, which refers to the process of making unethical behavior morally or socially acceptable. Specifically, subordinates learn cognitively and emotionally from ethical leaders to minimize the adoption of moral disengagement. When they decrease the use of moral disengagement, subordinates are less likely to display deviant behavior.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe an accounting ethics course whose purpose, in part, is to short circuit the process that leads to foolish ethical decisions by professional accountants. In addressing how to make ethical decisions, the course deliberately includes processes intended to develop wisdom and to impede reflexive decisions that reflect the five fallacies of thinking. The approach described represents an active, engaging approach to increasing dialogical and dialectical reasoning in students’ pursuit of wisdom through individual selection of outside reading, engaging speakers, and the use of ethics accountability groups. The course is adaptable to large and small class settings where the professor desires extensive interaction among students, and it creates an environment designed to help students develop self-chosen principles to guide their professional lives. Students take responsibility for developing self-determined principles to guide their professional lives. Clearly identifying these principles provides students a basis for resisting ethical compromises in their careers. The course focuses students on developing wisdom and recognizing the weaknesses in a purely calculation-based moral reasoning.